Women have always worked. As far back as societies have existed, women have given time and energy to raising children, looking after the home and providing for the community. It is a centuries-old tradition.
In the last hundred years, this remit has expanded to professional occupations outside of the home - often on farms and in factories.
And in the last twenty years, post-Apartheid, South African women have entered the Knowledge Economy en masse, ready to lead teams and start their own companies.
Though much has changed, deeply-ingrained attitudes remain resistant to change. Which is why, in the article to follow, we’ll break down where we’ve come from, where we stand, and where we’d like to be.
When did women enter the workplace?
In South Africa, women were working by the early 1900s, often as unskilled labourers or domestic workers.
During the World Wars, when men went to fight, this scope was expanded to factories and office jobs: here, women were able to prove their worth in the absence of men.
As Apartheid began in earnest in 1948, racial segregation took a bleak turn, and Black South African women were confined to low-wage domestic work, while White women occasionally enjoyed better-paid professional positions, albeit in a role subservient to male colleagues. During this time, Black women were particularly badly treated, with no pension to speak of, and the threat of termination hanging over their heads -- should they become pregnant.
Post-Apartheid, in 1994, things began to change. The Employment Equity Act of 1998 was designed to redress the imbalance, allowing women to be paid the same as men for the first time in history. But how do things stand today - and has the Act changed anything?
Women in the workplace today
While many women are now in leadership positions, there is very little parity in the highest echelons of business. According to 2022 statistics, the top 100 JSE-listed companies are overwhelmingly led by men: 93 to 7, in fact.
Widen that to the entire Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and only 8% of women are CEOs while 22% are CFOs.
You might then reasonably suggest that this is because more men are employed than women. But the statistics don’t bear this out: only 35.5% of women are out of work compared to 32.6% of men. A slight difference, yes, but not as stark as one might think.
So what’s going on?
Firstly, the gender pay gap is not a myth
In late 2023, Baker McKenzie cited the following: “South African women receive between 23% and 35% less than men for the same work. Stats SA has similar figures, noting recently that the gender wage gap alone was about 30% across the board.”
Crucially, these findings concern pay for the same work.
One: Unconscious bias is often in play
We wrote at length about unconscious bias at work in this blog post, but let’s give you a synopsis of it here. Unconscious biases - i.e., those stigmas we’re not aware of - tend to impact not only who we hire, but how competent we think the new hire is.
Men are often considered more competent by both male and female hiring managers (irrespective of the strength of the CV) and underrepresented groups often have their work harshly reviewed.
As such, when it comes to offering a baseline salary, or judging whether a candidate deserves a pay rise, men often earn more because of ingrained biases rather than objective realities.
This is significant, because it’s an inadvertent hangover of the historical legalese that disadvantaged women globally.
The upshot? You can change the law, but you can’t easily change attitudes.
Two: Women Face Double standards
In South Africa especially, many men grow up in hypermasculine households and attend hypermasculine schools where women are typically seen but not heard. This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as these young men grow up, enter the workplace, and baulk at taking orders from the opposite sex.
Women often find themselves in an unwinnable catch-22. To appear assertive is to be labelled unduly aggressive. To remain calm is to appear to be too passive to be a leader.
The system is not designed for women to lead the way they want to. And those women who do try to keep up are often disliked to the point of exclusion.
Three: Women often face a ‘double shift’ at home
Another barrier is that women are still seen as the homemakers in society, and even when they’re working, they often return home to face a “double shift”.
We see this all the time in our one-on-one coaching: the historical and cultural lens through which they’re expected to look after the home, cook, clean, and raise the children. This, in addition to bringing home a salary!
A double shift not only holds many South African women back from ever scaling the corporate ladder, but it keeps them in the grip of a particular mindset: that it’s the man’s job to make the real money.
Where to from here?
As passionate advocates of diversity, equity and inclusion, we want a system that’s fair for all - one that rewards women fairly and gives them the best opportunity to excel.
While women are no longer legally barred from earning what they deserve, the remnants of history are hard to wipe away, and many outdated attitudes persist.
No woman has yet been President of South Africa, and very few female Presidents have presided over any nation. Take that a step further, and organisations are still largely run by men, which means that, naturally, their preferences are advanced.
Throughout all of this, it’s important to remember that exceptional women have always existed, and continue to exist. This is true not only of South Africa but on a global scale.
Did you know for instance that it was Ada Lovelace who invented what we know today as the modern computer? Or that Stephanie Kwolek discovered the yarn that would become the building blocks of Kevlar? Or that Rosalind Franklin provided Crick and Waston with the impetus to model the DNA helix?
Much of what we’re trying to do at 54TwentyFour is change attitudes: to get the public at large to view the contributions of women as equal to those of men.
Women have faced legal and logistical hurdles, and while we continue to leap over them, it’s not until we start changing attitudes that real change will come.
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